Lead Software Engineer at DEV/Forem. Passionate about building communities, learning/sharing & software engineering. Always looking to make a difference in this world 🌍
Hi Dr. Rebecca :) Your work sounds super interesting, during those 11 years how did you go about researching the behaviour of wild sloths? What are some of the high level things you would do in a week of research?
My work has varied a lot over the years, but my biggest project was something called 'The Sloth Backpack Project'.
You think sloths would actually be quite an easy study subject because they don’t move that much. You’re not chasing a cheetah around the plains of Africa, after all. However, as I started to follow wild sloths around, I soon discovered that once they go up into the trees, you can’t do any observations on them whatsoever. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a glimpse of them every now and again. If you want to know what they’re eating and how much time they’re spending in different behaviors, you can’t see that with your eyes.
The Sloth Backpack Project utilizes the latest in animal-tracking technology to record, for the first time, exactly what wild sloths are doing. The backpacks contain small data loggers called 'Daily Diaries' that record body movement and environmental data up to 40 times per second. When you’re putting a data logger on an animal it is hard to use it in a collar format because the collar can twist around and you never know which direction the animal is facing. That’s where the whole backpack idea came from because it held everything nicely against the animal’s back. Whenever it moved or whenever it did anything we could have the data logger record it. The data loggers are recording GPS points so we know exactly where the sloth is, but they’re also recording every time the animal moves, every time it chews, every time it climbs down the tree or up the tree and we have pressure sensors so we know how high the animal is.
There are also temperature sensors and light sensors so we know whether he’s basking in the sunlight or curled up in the shade. You can really put together exactly what the wild sloths are doing and where they’re doing it. That is key to understanding their ecology. What I wanted to get out of all of this research is to help the conservation of the species. It’s difficult to conserve an animal that you know is suffering in the wild, when you don’t know what the species needs in order to survive.
We are about to expand this project later this year (once the pandemic calms down) because I really want to understand the difference in behaviour between sloths that live in healthy forests, and those that are living in disturbed areas. We are also in the middle of a huge genetics project to look at how habitat loss is affecting the genetic diversity of different sloth populations. This involves climbing a lot of trees to collect hair samples from hundreds of wild sloths!
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Hi Dr. Rebecca :) Your work sounds super interesting, during those 11 years how did you go about researching the behaviour of wild sloths? What are some of the high level things you would do in a week of research?
My work has varied a lot over the years, but my biggest project was something called 'The Sloth Backpack Project'.
You think sloths would actually be quite an easy study subject because they don’t move that much. You’re not chasing a cheetah around the plains of Africa, after all. However, as I started to follow wild sloths around, I soon discovered that once they go up into the trees, you can’t do any observations on them whatsoever. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a glimpse of them every now and again. If you want to know what they’re eating and how much time they’re spending in different behaviors, you can’t see that with your eyes.
The Sloth Backpack Project utilizes the latest in animal-tracking technology to record, for the first time, exactly what wild sloths are doing. The backpacks contain small data loggers called 'Daily Diaries' that record body movement and environmental data up to 40 times per second. When you’re putting a data logger on an animal it is hard to use it in a collar format because the collar can twist around and you never know which direction the animal is facing. That’s where the whole backpack idea came from because it held everything nicely against the animal’s back. Whenever it moved or whenever it did anything we could have the data logger record it. The data loggers are recording GPS points so we know exactly where the sloth is, but they’re also recording every time the animal moves, every time it chews, every time it climbs down the tree or up the tree and we have pressure sensors so we know how high the animal is.
There are also temperature sensors and light sensors so we know whether he’s basking in the sunlight or curled up in the shade. You can really put together exactly what the wild sloths are doing and where they’re doing it. That is key to understanding their ecology. What I wanted to get out of all of this research is to help the conservation of the species. It’s difficult to conserve an animal that you know is suffering in the wild, when you don’t know what the species needs in order to survive.
We are about to expand this project later this year (once the pandemic calms down) because I really want to understand the difference in behaviour between sloths that live in healthy forests, and those that are living in disturbed areas. We are also in the middle of a huge genetics project to look at how habitat loss is affecting the genetic diversity of different sloth populations. This involves climbing a lot of trees to collect hair samples from hundreds of wild sloths!